Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [117]
Two observations struck him: first, as he said later, that “the dress she had on was awful,” and second, that she was utterly beautiful. He was thirty, eleven years her senior, but in those moments on the dock he fell in love.
Suddenly his wireless troubles did not seem so overwhelming. He came to Brownsea more often, not just for lunch but also for dinner and high tea. When Beatrice left Brownsea for the family’s mansion in London, Marconi dropped his experiments and followed.
In London one evening Marconi went to the Albert Hall to attend a charity banquet organized by Beatrice’s mother. He had little interest in the charity. He found Beatrice at the top of a long flight of iron stairs. He asked her to marry him.
To this point, marriage had not entered her thoughts. She did not love him, at least not in the way that marriage might require. She asked for more time. He bombarded her with letters, using the post office’s express mail service, which dispatched messenger boys to carry important letters directly to their destinations.
At last Beatrice invited Marconi to tea. She told him, gently, that she would not become his wife.
He fled for the Balkans, behaving, Degna said, “like the jilted suitor in a romantic Victorian novel.” He contracted malaria, which would plague him with intervals of fever and delirium for the rest of his life.
BEATRICE WAS SURPRISED at how sad Marconi’s departure from her life had made her. Stricken with the grief of failed romance, she returned to Brownsea Island for another long stay. Mrs. Van Raalte promised her “solemnly,” according to Degna, that Marconi would not learn of her presence. But Mrs. Van Raalte liked Marconi and believed he and Beatrice constituted an ideal match.
Without telling Beatrice, Mrs. Van Raalte wrote to Marconi, still sulking in the Balkans, to tell him of Beatrice’s heartbreak. In the great conspiratorial tradition of Englishwomen of title, she invited Marconi to the island as well, this time as a houseguest.
Marconi accepted at once and returned to England as quickly as possible. Beatrice was stunned to see him but charmed by the fact that his ardor had not diminished. They took walks, and sailed, and fell into what Degna described as an “easy comradeship.” On December 19, 1904, as they walked through the heather on a headland overlooking the sea, Marconi again asked her to marry him. This time she said yes—on condition that her sister Lilah approved.
This meant another delay, for Lilah was in Dresden. Beatrice was unsure how to tell her sister the news and needed two days to compose her letter. “It’s so serious I don’t know how to break it to you,” she wrote. “I’m not crazy; it’s only this, I’ve settled the most serious thing in my life. Can you guess it—I am engaged to be married to Marconi…. I don’t love him. I’ve told him so over and over again, he says he wants me anyhow and will make me love him. I do like him so much and enough to marry him.” She added, “And to think I never meant to marry! I had always arranged to be an old maid.”
She did not yet reveal the engagement to her mother. First, she told one of her brothers, Barney, who approved and urged her to go to London to tell her mother and, more important, her eldest brother Lucius, who after the death of their father had become the ranking male, the fifteenth Baron Inchiquin. Nothing could happen without his consent.
Beatrice and Marconi set out for London. Soon after their arrival Marconi bought her a ring, which Degna described as “tremendous,” then paid a visit to the O’Brien family’s London mansion to ask Beatrice’s mother, Lady Inchiquin, for her daughter’s hand.
Nothing was easy. Lady Inchiquin was a bulwark of propriety.